For those who would like to get home from the theatre a bit earlier, the new Broadway campaign, "Tuesdays at 7," may be just the answer.

For those who would like to get home from the theatre a bit earlier, the new Broadway campaign, "Tuesdays at 7," may be just the answer.

A new initiative developed by the Broadway press agency Boneau/Bryan-Brown and the ad agency Serino Coyne hopes to set curtain times back one hour — to 7 PM — on Tuesday evenings. Although still in the early stages, those involved hope most, if not all, Broadway shows will implement the program this January.

Chris Boneau, who co-heads Boneau-Bryan-Brown, told Playbill On-Line, "The idea was to encourage people to come to the theatre on Tuesday nights . . . to drive [what is traditionally] a lower-attended evening of theatre. The research shows that people would really go to the theatre on a night if they didn't always have to go at eight o'clock. Unfortunately," Boneau added, "we're not like London, where you check the paper to see what time the curtain times are [because] they're wildly different. People are so accustomed to eight o'clock curtains . . . so the idea was to get a lot of shows involved.

Although a full list of shows will not be announced until October, Boneau explained, "Most everyone that we talked to is interested. . . Non-profit [theatres] do it a lot. Both Roundabout and Manhattan Theatre Club have early curtain evenings, and they're very popular. So, it's not a brand-new idea, it's just an idea that's new to Broadway. What it requires is a marketing effort behind it, so that everyone's not running around Times Square not knowing what time to be there . . . That's why we're calling it 'Tuesdays at 7.'"

Until the early '70s, the typical Broadway curtain time was 8:30 PM. —By Andrew Gans